Off-Season Dares

The ferry dock at Salt Creek was empty when I got off it, which was normal for a Tuesday in January. Nell, twenty-three years old, three winters into this housekeeping gig, walking a mile up the beach road with my kit bag and a thermos of bad coffee. The wind off the water had that salt-and-rot smell it always had in the off season, and the boardwalk planks creaked under nobody at all.

I liked it, mostly. Two years ago, when I was twenty-one, I'd had a fling with a tourist that lasted eleven days and rearranged me a little, and since then it had been me, the dunes, and a rotation of empty rental houses. Alive is a strong word for how I'd been feeling.

The Hardy house sat at the end of the lane, big and gray and peeling, with sand drifts piled against the deck like the beach was trying to take it back. Mr. Hardy, Jeffery Hardy, fifty-two, owned it and came down maybe twice a year. My instructions were always the same. Air the rooms, wipe the salt film off the windows, check the pipes, leave the key in the lockbox. He was supposed to be in Singapore or somewhere. The place was supposed to be empty.

So when I let myself in at dawn and found a man in a sweater reading by the living room window, I did the reasonable thing, which was to nearly die.

"Whoa. Okay. Hi." I had the spray bottle halfway raised like a weapon, which I put down fast. "Nobody said you were coming."

He looked up over his book without much hurry. He was a big man, broad through the shoulders, gray coming in at the temples, and he had a way of looking at you that made you feel like a form he was filling out.

"You must be Nell," he said. "The schedule changed. I decided against Singapore."

"They usually email me when the house isn't empty."

"They usually do a lot of things." He closed the book on his finger. "I told the agency to tell you. Whether they did is between them and their conscience."

They had not. I decided I'd be having words with the agency, and then I decided I wouldn't, because standing there in my wet raincoat with my coffee going lukewarm, the truth was I was a little glad the house had a person in it. Any person. This one came with good furniture and a fire already going.

"I'll get out of your way, then," I said. "I can come back Thursday."

"Or you could do the work you came to do. I promise not to watch you dust." He almost smiled. "Coffee's fresh if yours is the stuff in the thermos. I could smell it from here."

"It is bad," I admitted.

"Then have a cup and start upstairs."

So that was how it began, me wiping down windowsills in the master bedroom while a millionaire read Steinbeck downstairs, and both of us pretending that was a normal Tuesday. I did the whole first floor. He stayed out of the way. Around ten he made eggs and asked if I'd eaten, and I said I had, which was a lie, and he put a plate on the counter anyway and went back to his book, and I ate it standing up like a raccoon.

The weird part, and I want to be fair to the weird part, was that he didn't chat. Most owners who show up unannounced want to talk about the town dying or the seawall or their boat. Jeffery Hardy read his book and occasionally regarded me like I was weather he had decided to enjoy.

Around noon I was in the living room restacking magazines when he said, without looking up, "There's a bottle in the cabinet by the window. Twenty-year bourbon. I'd like your opinion."

"On bourbon? I drink beer out of cans, Mr. Hardy."

"Jeffery. And that's a shame. Come here."

I came over, because he was the boss and also because I was curious. He poured nothing. He just opened the cabinet and took out the bottle and handed it to me.

"From the bottle," he said. "That's the opinion I want. Neat, straight from the source. Most people sip this like it's church. I want to see somebody drink it like she means it."

"That's a dare," I said.

"It is."

"You're my boss."

"Also true." He set the book down flat on his knee. "You can hand it back and we never speak of it. Or you can take a pull and tell me what a twenty-year tastes like to a person who drinks beer out of cans."

I would like to explain the math I did in my head, except there wasn't any math. There was just the fact that I hadn't done anything off-script in about two years, and here was a man with gray temples and a fire going, daring me over whiskey in an empty house in January.

"Okay," I said, "but if I cough you're contractually obligated to forget it."

I got the cap off and took a real pull, a good swallow, and it went down as a lit match and then turned into something warm and oak-y and honestly kind of great. I took a second one for science. My eyes watered anyway.

"Well?" he said.

"It tastes expensive," I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. "And it tastes like I'm in trouble."

He smiled, and it was a dark smile, the kind that has plans behind it. "You're not in trouble. You've got good form. Most people do a little sip and a face."

"I grew up with four brothers." I handed the bottle back. "That was a Tuesday night in my house."

He set it on the side table, uncapped, like an invitation to come back later, and I went back to the magazines, and my hands were not entirely steady, and I liked that they weren't. Two years of dust and salt film and nobody daring me to do anything. I'd forgotten how it felt to have blood in your veins.

* * *

The dare came at three, while I was loading the washer in the kitchen.

"Nell."

"Jeffery," I said over my shoulder, matching him.

"Master bathroom needs doing. Grout's gone to mildew behind the shower."

"I know. It's on my list."

"Here's my complication." He came and leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, entirely too comfortable. "I want it done today. And I want you to do it in your raincoat and nothing else."

I stood there with a dish towel in my hand and did not laugh, which took effort. "In my raincoat."

"Raincoat. Boots if you want. It's a logical outfit for a wet job."

"That is the least logical outfit for any job."

"Maybe. It's still the one I want." He wasn't smiling now, or he was, but down deep where it didn't reach his eyes. "You can say no. I want that said plainly, because it matters. You can say no and we go back to windowsills and I'm just the old man who owns this place."

I looked at him. Fifty-two, broad, firelight on one side of his face. He wasn't begging and he wasn't ordering. He was dealing cards and showing me his own hand first, and the cards said here is a man who is bored in the same exact way I am bored.

Here's what I'll say about myself. I'm twenty-three, I've got a decent body and I know it, and the last person who saw it was a tourist named Daniel in the summer of two years ago, and he wasn't even that good, and I still think about those eleven days more than I'd admit at a party.

So I laughed, because it was either laugh or think, and thinking was clearly off the table.

"You're serious," I said.

"Completely."

"You're going to stand right there and watch me scrub grout in my raincoat."

"I'm going to sit by the fire and try not to watch. I'll fail."

"That's insane," I told him. And I pulled my boots off, and then my sweater, and folded both over the chair, down to my bra and underwear, with my raincoat still on my shoulders like the world's least effective bathrobe, and his eyebrows went up maybe a quarter inch, which from him was basically applause.

"For the record," I said, wriggling into my boots again, "the agency pays me for the grout and that's all I'm getting paid for. My job is not part of this. I can quit this game any minute and still have it."

"Agreed," he said, and handed me the bucket. "Your job stays your job. The rest is just a dare, and it costs you nothing to say no."

The master bathroom was the size of my whole apartment back in Salt Creek proper, and the grout behind the shower was as bad as he'd promised. Black streaks climbing the tiles like something out of a nature documentary. I got down on my knees with the scrub brush and the bucket and went to work, raincoat flapping around my thighs every time I leaned.

Jeffery stayed true to his word, more or less. He sat in the bedroom doorway in that wing chair by the fire, book open on his knee. I could hear pages turning. I could also feel his eyes on me every time I reached up, and the raincoat is not a long raincoat, and there is no version of scrubbing tile on your knees where a short raincoat behaves itself.

The weird part was how not-weird it felt after about ten minutes. My knees ached. My shoulders ached. The brush did its thing and I did mine and the mildew came up in gray ribbons and the whole time there was a fifty-two-year-old man pretending to read Steinbeck twenty feet behind me while I worked in my underwear. Three winters of housekeeping and this was officially the strangest job I'd ever taken. It wasn't even in my top five for uncomfortable, honestly. I once cleaned a rental where a guest had left a whole crab in a dresser drawer. That one stays with a person.

The problem was the heat. Steam from the hot water, fire going in the next room, rubber raincoat not exactly known for ventilation. By the time I'd done half the wall I was sweating through the coat and the coat was sticking to my back and my mood was going south fast.

"It's an oven in here," I said, without turning around.

"It's January."

"It's January in a sauna." I sat back on my heels and pushed the wet hair off my face. "Your raincoat idea has a flaw and the flaw is thermodynamics."

He turned a page. "Noted."

I went back to work, mostly to prove a point I couldn't quite name, and the heat kept building, and somewhere around the three-quarter mark I stopped caring about points. I stood, undid the coat buttons, and shrugged the whole thing off onto the towel bar. Bra and underwear and boots. Might as well have been nothing, the way the air hit me.

The page turning stopped.

I didn't look back. I knew exactly what I was doing and I did it anyway, and that's the part I keep chewing on since. Nobody made me. He asked, I said yes with my arms and my buttons, and it felt like opening a window in a shut house.

I finished the wall on my knees with my heart doing a slow drum, and when the last streak of mildew came up I sat back and looked at it, this clean white grid of grout, and called it done.

"Done," I said. "Come inspect your grout."

He came in. He looked at the wall. Then he looked at me, standing there in my boots and my underwear with a scrub brush in my hand, and he did not pretend to be inspecting anything.

"Good work," he said.

"You're staring."

"Yes. I'm owed one dare and I'm choosing my moment."

I put the brush down. "Okay. I'm listening. But I want it said plainly that you're buying me dinner after this, because I've decided I'm owed that."

"Fair. Dinner's mine regardless. Here's the dare." He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed again, that same card-dealer posture. "You finish the rest of the tile. The floor section. You do it the way you were doing it, except without the underwear."

I looked at him for a second. "You realize the floor section is the easy part. I could do the floor section in a parka."

"I realize."

"So this dare is just you asking me to take my underwear off."

"It is," he said. "I'm not going to dress it up as something clever. It's a plain ask. You can hand me your clothes and walk out that door and dinner's still on me and I'm still just the old man who owns this place."

There it was again, the same escape hatch he'd built the first time, held open like a door for a lady. And there I was again, doing the thing where I didn't think, because thinking was for people whose blood wasn't moving.

I would like to be truthful about the arithmetic, though, because there was a little this time. Daniel had never once asked me what I wanted. He just assumed, and I let him, and